#754: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ann Miura-Ko

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Hello boys and girls ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris show where it is my job to sit down with world class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives. This episode is a two for one and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary which is insane to think about and past one billion downloads to celebrate.

I've curated some of the best of the best some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes and internally we've been calling these super combo episodes. Because my goal is to encourage you to yes enjoy the household names the super famous folks but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars.

These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one we went to great pains to put these pairings together and for the bios of all guests you can find that and more at Tim.log slash combo and now with a further ado please enjoy and thank you for listening.

First up Arnold Schwarzenegger Austrian born bodybuilder star of total recall true lies twins and the terminator films among many others businessman philanthropist best selling author of be useful seven tools for life and the 38th governor of California. You can find Arnold on Twitter and Instagram at Schwarzenegger and you can join more than half a million subscribers to his newsletter pump club at Arnold's pump club dot com.

I was looking at a very old photograph of I think your first major bodybuilding competition in shoot got I think it was the junior mister Europe and I looked at this photograph and what stuck out to me was. If you we had just looked at the faces not the bodies it was so clear to me that you are going to win and that you knew or believed you were going to win your face was so confident compared to every other competitor.

Where did that confidence come from my confidence came from my vision because I am always a big believer that if you have a very clear vision of where you want to go. Then the rest of it is much easier because you know always why you're training five hours a day you always know why you're pushing and going through the pain barrier and why do you have to eat more and why do you have to struggle more why do you have to be more disciplined and all of those things become much more clear.

It's not like oh my god I have to do another 200 sit ups it's more kind of like I can't wait to do another 200 sit ups because that will get me one step closer to have the apps that I need the wind that Mister Universe that's my goal I see myself clearly on that stage.

Winning the Mister Universe I see myself very clearly of getting the trophy standing David the trophy raising it above my head and having hundreds of bodybuilders around me below me on stage looking up and idolizing me including the thousands of people watching the event so there was always make clear vision and that always inspired me to go all out so when I went for competition you have to understand I went to the junior Mister Europe during my time in the military.

And so what it took for me to go and to get on that train the sonan soup which was the people's train meaning kind of like it was not an snale to get that the other fast train it was the slow train that literally stopped and every train station to let workers off and to bring new workers on and that's what the train was and so with that you get went all the way to the street because it was the cheapest way of going because I didn't have much money and you didn't get hit by any

customs officers. Well we we got hit by the minute we got through it I didn't have my passport because you have to give up the passport when you go into the military right you pass I didn't have a passport passport we got afterwards when we were finished with the military so we got through and we got to Germany the

street got and so there was this will there that no matter what it takes even if I have to crawl to Germany that I will be there at that event because there was my shot when I saw the ads about this Mister Europe junior competition best get about that at let or office in German and that was my opportunity to really go and to make my first kind of entry into an international competition and I felt that I can

win it and that's what I was there for I wasn't there to compete I was there to win and so that's why you saw that facial expression there was a certain arrogance there there was a certain way that opposed with the other competitors I always felt during the pose of that I had my act together much more than the others did and then I'm going to make them feel inferior and I will win and I

would look face to the end physically to the judges that I'm the champion so you touched on something I really wanted to get into which is the psychological warfare of bodybuilding of life in general I really feel and this is a compliment I mean it is compliment a real master and if anyone who's watched pumping iron or or anything I think comes away with that as a takeaway how did you develop that and for

instance when you were I guess 17 or 18 how did you get inside the heads of those people at that point I think that it came about when I trained in the gym I always felt that people are kind of really vulnerable in certain areas so that someone that comes to the gym and works out because he wants to have a better body that he most likely will be vulnerable that's during conversations that I discovered in Munich when it was

trainer in the gym they were vulnerable when you say something like you're fat it was not like even a doubt in anyone's mind if 10 people would have looked at that guy or 100 people they all would have said that that guy is fat but he was outraged he said what do you really think I'm that fat that you mentioning it as it were you in the gym as I go to doctor's office and say I have a cough I don't go and beat around the bush as I have to tell him what the problem is and then he can give me the

medication I said this is the same thing in the gym as you come here because you're fucking fat and so that let's now let's off the problem and so there's no beating around the bush there either and so you know so I could see that they were kind of like shriveling up and kind of shocked so I could see the vulnerability and then I tried different lines and people and you know we're talking about the

here the here line or we're talking about the here color turning gray is and then they would just freak out you know about little things like that so it was natural that with all the experience that I got now being a train and working with people and orders that are learned about people's psychology and about their weaknesses and their strength and orders how do you build people up because my whole thing was let's first discover and talk about the

weakness and then let's go and rebuild everything so there was the idea to give this guy six pack to make him feel great to declare victory but next summer that he can go to the beach and that he can go and feel proud of himself and feel great and orders and then continue training so there was the idea so by the time I came to America and I started you know competing over here it was very clear that when I said to someone let me ask you something is it you have any

injuries or something like that and then they say would say we'll look at me and say no why my but no need to read all no my needs feel great and I say I'm asking I said well because your thighs look a little slimmer to me I mean I thought maybe you can squat though maybe there's some problem with lay extension or something this is really and then I saw them all for two hours in the gym always going in front of the mirror and checking up the thighs if the thighs still exist or something

so I mean this is you know people get people are vulnerable about those things so naturally when you now have a competition you use orders yeah and so did you use you ask people whether sick for a while you know whether they look a little leaner or that you know you know did you take a new salty food slightly and they say why I said because it looks like you have water

retention as they don't look as ripped as you were like a week ago so so that it's rose people off in an unbelievable way and they walk away kind of like this didn't bother them at all but then you you can see you watch them as they walk around the pump up room and when you warm up for the competition and you could see them kind of thinking to themselves kind of then going to

mirror and checking it out secretly and all that stuff so you know it works so I just slowly developed it because I always felt that sports are not just a physical thing as a perfect I felt that the mentality and the mental strength in sports in the psychology in sports is much more important than the physical thing because in reality I mean I see when I watch a

Mr. Olympia competition or Mr. Universe competition or any of those things you know they all look pretty much the same the top five guys but what makes one emerge is is the way he acts if he acts like a winner he seems smiling having a great time on stage and those so I felt that one should use the psychology one should use everything in as far as food supplements is concerned use your best you know

posing trunks try to use the sun out there and work out in the sun so you get tanned all around use the best posing routine just really give me a 10 of everything then you have a shot of winning and psychology was definitely part of that and you develop this arsenal of intimidation through the bodybuilding did you use that for instance in movies waiting in line to audition against other people who are going into

addition or anything like that did it apply to show business I never auditioned okay never it's because I would never go out for the regular parts because there was not a regular looking guy so my idea always was okay everyone is going to look the same and everyone is trying to be the blonde guy in California going to Hollywood interviews and then looking some of the lead in cute and orders okay how can I call myself a

nidge that is unique that only I have so I always felt like really strong about I have to get into the movie business like rich pocketed the leg Steve Reeves or Paul Winter Larry Gordon and others guys that were in the muscle movies in the in the 50s and 60s that's the way I'm going to get in there of course

you know the naysayers were right there and they said well you know this time is past this was 20 years ago you look too big you're too monstrous to muscular you will never get in the movie so that's what producers said in the beginning in Hollywood and they saw also with agents said managers they said I doubt that you're going to be successful in that because today's idols I mean this is not a 70s

on the days idols are you know doesn't half man al Pacino would be Allen I mean look at this is all little guys you know those are the sex symbols those are the hot stars look at you you wait 250 pounds or something like that this is that time is over but I felt still very strongly and at a very clear vision that the time will come by someone would appreciate that then sure enough when people saw me on talk shows they got inspired

directors like Barbara Jefferson and then bought the book of the hungry and headed written into a script and then did the movie with me because he believed in me that I had the personality and I had a certain strength and a certain kind of a look that would be great on the screen that the camera loves me and all that and so it worked I did stay hungry I did then pumping on the documentary I did the streets of San Francisco and worked then with Anne Margaret and with Kirk

darkness and the villain and then all of a sudden I got the contract for Conan the barbarian and bang there we were 20 million dollar movie which today will be a equivalent of a 200 million dollar movie and the Nathanael Rendes producing universal studio and international studio financing the movie and John Millius first class director directing it so my whole plan worked and I was so right even John Millius after his

on the movie he said if we wouldn't have had Schwarzenegger we would have had to build one because of the body and when I did Terminator Jim Cameron said if we wouldn't have had Schwarzenegger and we couldn't have done the movie because only because he sounded like a

machine was it so believable that he actually played a machine and that's what where people bought him and he says I'll be back it's totally different and I say I'll be back kind of thing is so so he was the greatest compliment that the very things that the agents and the

managers and the studio executive said would be a total obstacle became an asset and my career started taking off the not auditioning is really interesting to me I knew you were very successful in real estate but correct me from wrong you had become a millionaire in real estate before your first movie is that right not before the first movie before my career took off got it so I did not rely on my movie career to make a living because that was my intention because I saw

over the years the people that worked out in the gym and they didn't have any acting classes they all were very vulnerable because they didn't have any money and they had to take anything that was offered to them because that was the living I didn't want to get into that situation I felt like if I am smart with real estate and take my little money that I make in bodybuilding and be seminars and selling my courses through the mail order in order

I could save up enough money to put down money for an apartment building and I realized that in the 70s the inflation rate was very high and therefore an investment like that is like unbeatable because buildings that I would buy for $500,000 you know we didn't

get $800,000 and I only put the maybe a hundred down so you know you made 300% on your money so you couldn't beat that so I quickly developed and traded up my buildings and bought more apartment buildings and office buildings on Main Street, Down in Santa Monica and so on and the investments were very good and it was just one of those magic decade the day you couldn't do it in that same field there's another field in real estate where you can do that but in this particular field

I don't think you will see those kind of jumps ever again and I benefited from that and I became a millionaire from my real estate investments and there was before my career took off in a show business in acting which was after Conan the barbarian in 1982 that movie came out we shot it in 81 and in 82 it came out so from that point on my career to go off because people saw you know that the movie was successful at the box office then you know I signed a contract

to do Conan number two and you know then that led to a contractor you know for Terminator one and then Commander you know then the action genre or as I said was another fortunate thing each of those decades offered something very fortunate that was a little bit beyond my control but I benefited from that you know so that there was the action genre that all of a sudden took off in the 80s with Stallone and Phantom and all

those guys coming in really was terrific and our salaries went you know mine I good like a million dollars for Terminator 2 and then all of a sudden by the end of the day I made 20 million dollars that's incredible and I wanted to talk about the mail order for a second because that was done with

Franco Colombo or it would be Franco Colombo who for those that don't know is a European was a European champion in powerlifting and also boxing champion and then became a bodybuilding champion and then he brought him over here with Joe Weed's help to train with me here in America but at that

point there was no money in bodybuilding that's the key thing that everyone has to understand unlike the day where the top bodybuilding champions make millions of dollars in those days there was no money in bodybuilding and so when we didn't have enough money we literally had to go to work

and so Franco and I said Franco's talent was to be a bricklayer and a very skilled bricklayer and learned that in Italy and in Germany we were able to go and start thinking about the idea of putting an ad in the LA Times creating a company and calling it European bricklayers and

masonry experts, marble experts building chimneys in fireplaces the European style and this was also a time where everything that was European was huge in America so we benefited from that you know Swedish massages and everything had to be kind of a foreign name or a Japanese this and this

so Europe and Japan and all these places you know were used the names were used because for some reason the other people just thought that was better and so we used that in the ad and we put the ad in the paper and literally a week later we had the big earthquake in Los Angeles and I mean the

chimneys fell off the apartment houses and orders of and they're cracked walls and orders and so Franco and I we as a member of one of the friend of ours wife who was very smart and she worked in a supermarket she did answering the phones and calling people back and orders just to make sure

that our English doesn't get all screwed up with the talking over the phone and all this and so she gave us the addresses and then we got to do the estimates and I was kind of like set up to be the math genius and it figures out the square footage and that Franco will play the bed guy and I played

a good guy and so we will go to someone's house and then someone would say well look at my patio is all cracked can you guys put a new patio in here and I would say yes and then I would run an out with the tape measure but there would be a dead measure with centimeters and no one in those days

could at all figure out anything with centimeters and we would be measuring up and I say what is you see now for her ameters and 82 centimeters and they had no idea we were talking about and this is so much and then we were we were writing up formulas and the dollars and amounts and

and square centimeters and square meters and all this stuff and then I would go to the guy and I said it's five thousand dollars and the guy will be in a state of shock and he says it's five thousand dollars I said this is outrageous I said I mean that yeah they didn't think that is

they say well what did you expect that the basis I thought maybe it's like two three thousand dollars is about five thousand it says I said let me talk to my guys it's because he's really the masonry expert I said but I can beat him down for a little bit here let me soften the meat

and then I will go over to Franco and we will start arguing in German you know there's any spider-eyed the constantly so far filled with a lung and this is the employees need me to be working here in America and this will be going on and he will be screaming back in me

in Italian and some stuff and then I will be and then always and he come down and then we'll go to the guy I said who okay here is I said I could get him as low as three thousand eight hundred dollars I said can you go with that and he says thank you very much I say you know I really

think that you're a great man blah blah blah and all that stuff I said okay I said give us half down right now we go right away and get the cement and get the bricks and everything that we need for here and we just start working I said a Monday and the guy was ecstatic he gave us the money

we immediately ran to the bank cash to check to make sure that the money's in the bank account and then we went out and got the cement the the wheelbarrow and the order the stuff that we needed and went to work and so we worked like that for two years I mean very successful as a

mevac then and we had the various different jobs where we employed like sixteen different body builders all the lazy as fast as that you can never hire but never because they all were interested in working outdoor and getting a tan at the same time for their bodybuilding competitions they were

not interested in working but anyway we all had a good time we all made money and this is actually then I did this until I started my mail order business and then that became the new source of extra income so we could afford everything and then save all this a money and so on I've been

very fascinated to look at your film career and hear the story of twins I was hoping maybe you could tell us the story of twins how twins came together and how you guys structured that deal because I didn't know anything about that twins came together because I felt very strongly that I had a

side of me that is a very humorous side and that if someone would be patient enough and willing to work with me as a director that they will be able to bring that humor out of me and that's something that is very difficult because you can be humorous in your private life but cannot pull it off in

a movie there's many actors that have tried that and were not successful so I felt you know that I should really talk to Ivan rightman because I really loved Ghostbusters and I said to myself God it was so well directed and all this and that just happened to run into him when there was

an Aspen we were hanging out there was so Robin Williams and some other people and we were all up there it's no mass and we were skiing and then at night and before dinner we already had a great time sitting but a fireplace and choking around and Ivan rightman would say to me honored I

listened to you and I see a side of you that has never really been on screen and I said to him I said I would love to do a comedy and I would love to bring that side out if it is the innocence of me or the navy of me or the humor of me whatever it is I said I would like to see that on the screen

I think it could be good as I said I want you to work with me and to direct me in a movie let's figure out what it should be and he said okay I would love to do that I'm going to go home after Christmas after this vacation and I'm going to look into and develop a bunch of ideas and then

you and I get together and then picture the one that we like the best he developed immediately we didn't short period of time a bunch of ideas I think there was five ideas and the one that we both like the most was called the experiment which then became twins experiment we didn't like because

of mid-Jewelman Austrian background so we thought that it would be better to call it twins and we developed that project got it written I came up with the idea then of Danny DeVito that it shouldn't be just someone that is acting totally opposite of the way I am but it should also

look physically totally opposite of the way I am I even loved that idea and then we went after Danny DeVito and I remember we sat in the restaurant and we made a deal on a napkin and wrote down you know this is what we do we're going to make the movie for free we don't want to

get it any salaries and we get a big back end and I eventually take this deal with the end with the agent to the studio and he took it to Tom Pollock who was then running a universal studio Tom Pollock said this is great we can make this movie for you know 16 and a half million dollars

if you guys don't take a salary and you get a big back end we're going to give you 37% of whatever it was together Danny Ivan and me and we worked out the percentage of what our salaries are so whatever Danny got at that time for a movie versus what I got for a movie and versus what Ivan got for

directing so we worked it up percentage wise and that's how we ended up dividing up the pot amongst ourselves and let me tell you I made more money on that movie than any other movie and that the gift keeps on giving it's just wonderful and I remember Tom Pollock after the movie came

out he said to me he says or I can tell you he says this is what you guys did to me and he bent over he turned around bent over and he put his pockets out and he says you fucked me and cleaned me up he says I will never make the deal again

but anyway so the movie was a huge hit it came out just before Christmas and throughout Christmas and New Year it made every day three to four million dollars which in the days term it will be of course you know double or triple but it was just huge and it just went up to 129 million dollars

domestically and I think worldwide it was like a 360 million dollars or something like that so it was really very very successful and it like I said it ended up costing I think around $18 million dollars the movie amazing so amazing now when I hear a story like that I think of

the deal the George Lucas did for Star Wars where the studio is like ah toys whatever sure yeah you can have the toys and they probably felt very much the same way they're like wow we're not gonna make that mistake again that's right I've heard you mentioned trends in dental meditation

in passing briefly do you meditate I don't meditate now but I got heavily into it in the 70s and I remember there was a time in my life where I felt like everything is just kind of coming together and I did not find a way or couldn't find a way of keeping the things separate

so it was always when I was thinking about I was thinking about it at the same time my body building career I was thinking about my movie career I was thinking about the documentary pumping art that we're shooting right now and the movies stay hungry that we just finished shooting and my

investment in the apartment building and is this gonna do I get the financing from the bank and the all of this kind of stuff was always coming together and at the same time I was training for the Miss Olympia competition in South Africa and I was training right here at Goldschirm

and I remember there was all the camera equipment around five hours a day in my face and then someone in the middle of squatting was trying to change the battery pack I'm a lifting belt and all this so yeah it was like you know eventually I felt like I got to do something about it because

I have such great opportunities here and everything is happening and everything is going my way but I'm just clustering everything into one big problem rather than separating it out and having calm and peace and and being happy and so I but total you know coincident I ran into this guy that

I've run into many times in the beach very very pleasant man who told me that he is a teacher in transcendental meditation and I said well it's interesting imagine it is it because I feel like I should do something because I feel like I'm just overly worried and excited and all this stuff

and I feel like certain pressures that I've never felt before and he says oh Arnold it's not uncommon it's very common a lot of people go through this this is why people use meditation transcendental meditation as one way of dealing with the problem and he was very good in selling it because

he didn't say it's the only answer he just is one of many and he says why don't you try it this is I'm a teacher there I've been westwood I would not be able to teach since we have friends and we have many years is there will be another teacher that I will give you a mantra and blah blah

and teach you how to do it and then I can help you after that because I will be teaching of this so why don't you come up on Thursday and I will be there I would introduce the folks up there and so now I went up there took a class and I went home after that and then tried it I said I was

going to give you the shot and that did 20 minutes in the morning 20 minutes at night and I would say we didn't 14 days three weeks I got to the point where I really could disconnect my mind and as they say to find this few seconds of this connection and rejuvenate the mind and also

learn how to focus more and to calm down and that's all the effect right away that I was much more calm about all of the challenges that were facing me and I continued doing that then for a year and by that time it felt like I think that I've mastered this I think that now I didn't feel

overwhelmed anymore and I really felt kind of it was one of the things where in the transcendental meditation was kind of anxiety and pressure meeting around the corner tranquility you know this is kind of what it felt so I was happy from the point on even the day I still benefit from that

because I don't merge and bring things together and see everything is one big problem I take on one challenge at the time and when I go and I study my script for a movie then the day when I study my script for a movie I don't let anything else in the fear in that not just concentrate on that so

the other thing that I've learned is that there's many forms of meditation in a way because like when I study and I work really hard where it takes the ultimate amount of concentration I can only do it for 45 minutes maybe maybe an hour but then I have to kind of run off and maybe play chess

and I play chess for 15 minutes then I can go back and I have all the energy in the world again and jump right back and then continue on with my work as if I've not done it at all the day right it's like I'm fresh and so that's another way I think of meditation and then I also figured out

that I could use my workouts as a form of meditation because I concentrate so much on the muscle and I have my mind inside the bicep winner to my curls I have my mind inside the pectoral muscles when I do my bench press so I'm really inside and it's like again a form of meditation because

you have no chance of thinking or concentrating on anything else at that time but just that training that you do so there's many ways of meditation and I benefit from all of those and I'm the day much calmer because of that and much more organized and much more tranquil because of that this whole

conversation makes me want to go tackle the world just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show this episode is brought to you by a G1 the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement and the true answer is invariably a G1 it simply covers a ton of bases I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road

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A G1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase so learn more check it out go to drink a G1 dot com slash Tim that's drink a G1 the number one drink a G1 dot com slash Tim last time drink a G1 dot com slash Tim check it out and now and Miracot a co-founding partner at floodgate venture capital firm a repeat member of both the Forbes mightest list and the New York Times top 20 venture capitalist worldwide one of Forbes most powerful women in startups and a Stanford lecturer and member of

the board of trustees of Yale University you can find and on Twitter at and a maniac and welcome to the show thanks for having me so there are so many places we could start I was hoping to humanize the ever intimidating and miracle which I may only partially succeed

at doing but could we start with explaining why your brother used to introduce you or how he used to introduce you on stage I had this brother an older brother by exactly two years were born on the same day and he was one of these guys who's so confident he knew that he wanted to stay cars

and airplanes from the time that I could remember him existing and he was always confident with friends and he was also confident on stage and so as any good Asian child would do we played musical instruments I played piano he played the violin and we would always have to perform and I was painfully

painfully shy and so I would get up on stage and I would refuse to speak and my mother knowing this wouldn't let this get in the way of our performing she would send my brother up on stage to help announce whatever I was playing I have this real clear memory of being in junior high and having

this happen my brother got up on stage and said you know this is Ann Mura she's going to be playing a Chopin nocturn and go and I looked over and I remember thinking to myself the mental dialogue that's happening in a teenager's mind this is totally ridiculous because I'm sitting there in

front of a room full of people and I felt fine playing the piano but I felt petrified speaking and that's one of like the clearest memories that I have of my brother and me and the difference that we had between the two of us why are you so shy or nervous about speaking I've always been

an introvert so I think it comes probably directly from that but I was also sort of I was a strange child I've been met I had a lot of different interests but I love to do things by myself I wasn't really that interested in talking to other people like one of the first things my mom actually

discovered about me when I was a little kid when I was two I only spoke Japanese we were living in Michigan and I used to be this very hostile little child and I would walk by anyone speaking in English and in Japanese I would say I wish you would leave so you know and like I can't even

wow my poor mom my poor mom and so she was like oh we really should socialize and with people who speak English and we're living in Michigan so there's no shortage of people just a hit pause do you do you still speak Japanese I do so I speak Japanese to my parents how do you say I wish

you would leave just for people who want to mutter that to people in the park or wherever they might be is do you recall or how might you've said that as a kid do you have any idea I think I might have said let me think about it that's doesn't know it's gonna dip the Hoshina

that is aggressive that's really aggressive yeah you know I was like you're not welcome in this house oh my god it was like it was I think probably more likely it was Udu-Sai-Nah which is right right oh wow that's even worse yeah right and so but so it was always

Udu-Sai-Nah is like something that like a drunk dad says yeah yeah it's kind of like shut up yeah you're really loud you're really irritating but like in like a little in transition two-year-old saying that to a grown-up speaking English in her home okay I don't want to take us

too far off the rails but we we may come back to that okay so we were talking about you being introverted and shy and weird yeah and it was one of these things that I think it really helped me back and I knew I knew actually it was holding me back the strange part though was my mom was

recently talking to me about this in a few years prior to that experience where I'm in junior high I'm on stage I had actually done this other thing which was we had this summer school program where I would go to local community college it was foothill college and all these schools

around the area when they let out for summer the students would go to this community college to take math classes and writing classes and whatnot so a lot of elementary school students to high school students would be at foothill college and so my mom said you have to pick two classes and one class

was a math class obviously and she said you could pick your second class and my brother picked a normal junior high school writing class and I was in fifth grade at the time so 10 years old and I picked a negotiations class and it was not in the summer school program it was an adult class

why did you pick that I picked it because I remember the book was getting to yes no yeah my mom looked at me and she said why did you pick this class and I said it's because they're teaching you how to get to yeah and I want to know how to get to yeah and I have this

incredible experience this community college of having a class with I imagine they were probably 30 to 50 year old adults taking this class and they were probably the most patient wonderful people and you know we have this experience where you had certain supplies that you were given

on pieces of paper and then you had to negotiate you're on Mars and you had to negotiate supply lines and whatnot and create a real society and in the simulation they're taking seriously a 10 year old kid who's negotiating for supplies and I remember taking that experience

and feeling like you know I was taken seriously in that environment but it was a great experience because it was a small class it was like 20 people and in that setting I felt okay speaking up but then on stage I didn't still and so it was sort of these small steps that felt like I was

getting closer and closer to realizing oh I need to actually be able to speak up I need to be able to say things in front of a large audience and so there was this desire to face my fears so what was the next step after that how did you go about facing the fear of speaking on stage

I get to high school and as every high school freshmen doing their looking for different activities to participate in and I decided to dive into speech and debate and speech and debate at this time at Palo Alto High School was not a very big activity there are probably about 20 students on the team

and I found that I really enjoyed it and it was a really great group of students and then not only from Palo Alto High School but from the local community and I just fell in love with the idea that you could really seriously get up in front of an audience and talk about really

important issues even as a high school student and so I dove into that activity and it was frankly terrible at it I think freshmen sophomore year I didn't win any tournaments didn't even come close that was sort of the way though I decided I could face that fear what kept you going I mean

there's the answer that or perhaps potential answer you gave just a moment ago which is you really enjoyed it and you loved it but what did you love about it what did you enjoy so much that you were able to persist through failures over those first two years the first thing is just the people

I reflect actually the people that I met in speech and debate and they're doing incredible things we have just in my my year alone not in my team but in my local community professors you know ones at Harvard and government ones in philosophy university of Colorado one woman is now on the the morning

show on an PR we have several venture capitalists it was just a really interesting group of people all in the same age group who wanted to talk about really interesting things I also found that the actual activity itself it challenged me in a way that I hadn't been challenged before

so I was really good at math and science and those things really came naturally to me but getting up on stage and speaking was not something that was natural to me but the piece that I did love that came very naturally was competition and I've always been this way

yeah no I'm just chuckle because yeah I can I can how to grew with that right I love I love competition you put in points on anything and I want more I want more than the next person and I remember the coaches that we had we we didn't have teachers at our school who were able to coach

and so we had to go across the street to Stanford and find students who were willing to coach and these kids were 18 to 21 years old so they would pump us up by saying hey if you can get someone to cry in cross examination I'll buy you a slice of pizza and so you know things like that

were extraordinarily motivating and you like you know logic and arguments could get you a step further it was just something that even though I wasn't good at it at the time I just loved it and I felt like if I could just do one more tournament I'd become even better at it and you would

see that so that's that's the thing that I loved so do you have any memory this seems like a very very specific example that you gave the crying in the pizza did that actually happen did you succeed at making someone cry in cross examination for a slice of pizza or is it was that just something

that I feel like I'm not succeeding in my desire to humanize me and make myself seem like a less of a dragon lady but we'll get there we'll get there but this I want to hear I want to hear this story so there are several stories so there were points in time or I remember people would cry

in that they would crumble in the middle of cross examination and run out of the room crying and my coach would see that and proudly bring me a slice of pizza after this happened multiple times this wasn't a single tournament and there were moments where they had courtesy points too

so it wasn't just about winning it was also whether you were courteous bring that there were rounds where I got zero courtesy points and my coaches they would ask why we got zero courtesy points just to really understand if we were just being mean but a lot of times it was just because we were

you know and I was particularly tenacious in cross examination and and even at the point where I had the person stumped I would just keep going I would keep going keep going at it and so I remember at least four or five occasions where someone cried and left the room before the round was over.

This was like the cobra chai of debating who's like the bad team from the karate kid and it's my my my six year old at one point right before kindergarten said hey mama I can make people cry just with my words and I have to say it was like a really proud moment for me and then I had to

course correct and talk to him about that but. Now for someone who is wondering what I omitted from the bio that's ahead in front of me you had two years of not doing well and then in the bio we have she placed first in the national tournament of champions and second in the state of

California in high school and it goes on I'll I'll mention one more thing it was part of a five percent team at yellow that competed in the roguo cup competition and Paris France all right but let's focus on the debating so how did you go from to miss club with not succeeding in debating to

getting good at debating yeah this is where I think it's the love of the game where your parents supportive through all of these early trials and tribulations no no so you have to you have to remember you know I come from very traditional Japanese parents who really want me to get into a great

university and my mom at one point right after sophomore year looks at my record and my parents were incredibly supportive they would go and judge these tournaments every single weekend spend so much time doing it driving us all over the state and my parents pulled me aside and said

you know this isn't working you have a losing record in this activity that you're doing and you appear to be doubling down on your time with respect to this and if you want to get into a good college you have to perform well in whatever you're doing it's not just about effort you

have to have results and I remember my mom said to me I've heard fencing is a great way to get into an Ivy League and I remember looking at her and I was like how is it possible that she's my mother she clearly does not know anything about my athletic abilities if she's suggesting that I move

into fencing at this moment and so I said to them point taken give me the summer and I'm going to just work on it and this is back before the internet so working on it meant I was at Stanford green library reading philosophy books and reading articles about I think they have 12 topics 12 possible

topics that they're going to pull from for the next year and I just studied those topics I lived in the library and then I emerged that year to start competing and when they announced that first topic I knew that topic cold and then I could write my cases really quickly I had already done

all this research and I remember going into my very very first round and I had this deal with my parents if I didn't win one of my first two tournaments or at least place then I would quit and I had this distinct impression walking into my very first round of debate that fall and feeling as

I looked across at my opponent that there was no way that they could have out prepared me and so I knew that whatever they they said I would have five arguments against and it was this incredible knowledge that it's not that you can be lucky and turn your luck around you actually make your own

luck and for me that was a profound lesson because I placed in that tournament and I placed in the next tournament and it was like that it just never stopped after that and I had a losing record all through my freshman sophomore year and it's like I turned it around junior year very suddenly

and the main difference was that I was willing to outwork and outdo every competitor who walked in through that door for people who don't know the format and I'll be honest I've been surrounded by and that's surrounded by but certainly in the same universities and so on where debate teams existed but I've never seen a debate competition what is what is the format?

It's a bunch of nerdy kids dressed in suits holding briefcases and then maybe that's changed but that's what it was back then and then you have a resolution that's been announced nationwide and that resolution is generally has some philosophical omens to this is also Lincoln Douglas style of

debate and you have what does that mean if you don't mind me? So it's one person against one person so it's individual and it's value based and so you're really debating philosophy so an example of one debate that we did with the principle of majority rule ought to be valued above the principle of minority rights or resolved that education is a privilege and not a right.

So all of these debates are really surrounding not a specific policy but it has some application in the real world and what you're trying to debate is a philosophical underpinning behind that statement and what I loved about debate was you were actually forced to debate both

sides so you had to have cases ready for both the affirmative and the negative so pro the resolution and against the resolution and the format is the affirmative goes up and talks about this resolution and says all the reasons that they support it and then there's a short cross examination where the

negative then cross examines the affirmative asks questions of the affirmative then the negative gets up and talks about all the reasons that they're against the resolution and then goes point by point against all of the arguments that the affirmative made and talks about why they're wrong

and then there's another cross examination of the affirmative against the negative and then the affirmative gets up for a rebuttal negative gets up for a rebuttal and then the affirmative does closing arguments that sort of shorter and shorter speeches towards the end. And how is the outcome determined what are the parameters? So it really depends on the term aside from courtesy.

courtesy points it's all about courtesy there's two different types of tournaments actually when I was debating one was where you had parent judges and that I would say really the style of speaking your flair really would come into play your sense of humor it wasn't really just a line-by-line arguments there was also places where you would go where college students were the judges or experienced coaches were the judges and that's where really the line-by-line logic becomes much

more important than just the style of your debate. So it really depends on your audience and you had to read the audience correctly. And did they just then say I choose A or B or do they have to rank like the sort of Olympic style one to 10 in some fashion. So you only have two debaters that you're judging and you vote for one of them and in some of the rounds you have just a single judge and then in another in the breakout rounds the semi-finals you might have a panel of judges.

They can't confer they're just sort of voting individually on who wins. So you you may be at a point now with debate and argument that you've reached the unconscious competency phase in the sense that in skill acquisition one framework that one could use to think about skill acquisition as you go from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious

competence then unconscious competence. So I don't know if this question is going to be a good one but I'll I'll try it anyway for people who want to get better at debating and structuring arguments and so on. Are there any books or approaches or resources anything exercises that you would suggest? Well getting to yes. I thought was always really good. I actually found the philosophical

texts to be extraordinarily informative. So anything where you have that secratic method in a book I found really a great way of learning how people debate the greatest philosophers, Aristotle and Socrates even you know when you get into more modern literature around justice you have people like John Rawls writing that is actually a dialogue and a real logical debate and I always found

those examples to be really great to read how people argue philosophical constructs. You know presidential debates to be honest in politics aren't real debates because it's two ships passing in the night and you don't have real conflict between people. I've also found like the British parliamentary system if you've ever had the chance to see that on I think sometimes it's on C-SPAN. That's actually an interesting observation of a real world debate as well because they will actually engage and

dialogue around policy and it's not just ad hominem attacks. I find those sort of real world examples much more powerful than someone going sort of point by point in teaching you how to debate because I think that how is much more around how do you engage in the idea? How do you read

and research both sides of an argument and what do you believe on both sides? And so you know one way to do that would actually to take a fairly controversial topic and then actually read read a lot of literature on both sides of the argument and then understand where actually the conflict happens are there definitions that people don't agree on are there nuances that people haven't thought about is there real conflict or are they two ships passing in the night?

I think you could do that with even the gun control debate or you could do that with immigration or you could do that with abortion and really understand both sides of an argument and that's the way to engage in the process of debate I believe. If we're reflecting back on your co-brok eye training for slices of pizza I'd be really curious to know if there are any particular approaches or questions or playbooks that you find very useful in a heated argument and I'll give

you some hypotheticals right let's say that you are on stage at an event and you are doing a Q&A with the audience and you have someone who ends up being really hostile or attacks you or it could be someone on stage you're just having a contentious debate of some time I find it fascinating to

see how people even with no real logical advantage shut down opponents and I'm not saying that's you in this case but for instance whatever people may think of our of our dear current president of the United States I do find it fascinating how effective he has been at saying check your facts

right and it just throws enough imbalance into the dynamic where someone's like wait a second maybe I did miss one piece of due diligence that they're on their heels and it opens up a window and creates sort of an illusion of them being stymied that is really advantageous I'm like wow

I mean it's kind of gross on one level but it's also kind of brilliant and I also have a lot of lawyers in my family so one thing that they'll do not to say they all love arguing but a lot of them do you'll say something and they will go so let me just get this straight you're so I understand

you're you're saying that X and they'll kind of take your argument and like inch it a little closer to absurdity but just subtly enough that you'll say yeah that's about right and they'll say okay so really what you mean is X right and they start to edge you over before they even counter

with an argument to make you contradict yourself or kind of seem ridiculous and then they just have to kind of finish you off I've never taken debate but I do find this really practical and really interesting so it's a long way to get your intro but what are your thoughts on any of that it's

funny my husband has said to me in the past and this is a lesson that I continue to try to learn and relearn is that life is not a debate right and you know what he's saying it's funny he was a debater as well in college and in high school and we joke that I would still have beaten him in high

school if we had actually gone head to head but I think it's a really important point that life isn't about winning the argument and what he's also said to me in the past it's not about being right and I think that's so true it's something that I'm always trying to really practice in

life and I think it's the debate on me makes it really hard the things that you're pointing out are what's important about it is that people have a tendency to have an inner dialogue where they're right and instead of really listening to the other person they're coming up with the next argument

that proves that person wrong so if you go back to what I really loved about debate and what I felt like I got out of it it was actually this ability to see both sides of an argument to really delve into a topic and understand why the the side that I actually naturally believed

could actually be flipped on its head and that was a really important skill to develop and I think that was so much more important to develop than the skill to argue for my side because I think the world today what we don't see enough of is empathy for people you might even disagree with

and we get stuck in our version of truth and what is right and we aren't truth seekers and me more as a result we're truth winners that's right true yeah very true that's a piece that really makes me sad is that you know when people are like oh this debate skill is so great to have because

now you can like ram people with your ideas and I've never seen a situation where you shouted people down and convinced them you were right I've seen situations where by developing true empathy for the other side you actually create bridges and you create commonality and you create situations where

you can actually work together and I think that's the piece I would take away from my debate experience I would say actually making the person cry and cross examination and probably is not the skill that I should be using in real life although maybe sometimes I do just when you're teaching your

son the black magic I should point out just so people don't think I'm completely sort of drinking the cool aid of the bloodlust of this potential sport although I do find it very very fascinating as an insight into some parts of human nature but the book you mentioned getting to yes which is part

or a byproduct of the Harvard negotiation project as I recall yeah is not a book about proving you're right it's a book about getting outcomes yes and there is another book which I believe was co-authored by one of the co-authors of getting to yes called getting past no which I also

really really like and it is about both of these books any book really on negotiation is about achieving a very particular outcome or arriving at a desired result as opposed to proving that you're right so I just want to underscore that because there is a very real world difference

as you already noted between say debate and negotiation right toolkits are very similar perhaps in some respects but in debate you're not going to have to think about I wouldn't imagine something like the batten that they talk about in getting to yes your best alternative to

negotiate agreement like walk away power or what your options are you don't necessarily have to go through that thought process but when you step into the real world you're not just trying to prove that you're right you're trying to get someone to concede something and agree to a certain

set of terms or a price or whatever it might be or amicably trying to break up with someone or get together with someone or would have a divorce or whatever it might be you're really trying to manifest some type of outcome or damage control it's really really different from being a

truth winner and the world class term that I mentioned in the intro that I used a little bit of foreshadowing saying that I suspected it might come up a little bit later so I'm doing in doing homework for this conversation I read and I don't think this is a misquote but that your dad even

when I think you were going to be photocopying in the dean's office would remind you to be world class yeah and you would ask if you turn in a calculus assignment is that a world class effort yeah could you talk a little bit more about this and if that wasn't my experience growing up my

parents certainly encouraged me to do a good job but tell us a little bit more about your dad in this particular case and how that was used my dad grew up in Tokyo right at the tail end of world war two and so one of his earliest memories actually is just planes coming across Tokyo and

the fire bombs and he escaped to the countryside and then came back to Tokyo for high school his father passed away when he was in college and he literally tutored kids one guy was like the prime minister's son so that he could make enough cash to support his family he had three other

siblings and he was one of these incredible academics and so he was at the top of his class in one of the famous high schools in Tokyo went to Tokyo University was also then went to Toshiba which at the time was one of these great companies to work for and then he ran into a friend who told him

he was also a friend who was one of the top at his high school who said hey there's great opportunities in America and this person had gone off to Princeton and gone his PhD and was at that time working in one of the the great labs in IBM and was also becoming a professor and and my dad decided that he also wanted to go to the US and he was the eldest son and so having a mother who's a widow and three siblings he had to take care of them until he had saved up enough all of his siblings were

married and his mom had the courage to say you know what you can go you can go to the US so this is sort of the backdrop for who my dad is he comes to the United States without speaking very much English gets a PhD in mechanical engineering aerospace engineering and then is in LA ultimately

as a postdoc and an associate professor my mom comes to marry him and they are the only family members living in the United States so really no support so my dad eventually makes his way out to NASA at Moffett Field and my memories of him he was very engaged on the academics but he would wake up at five in the morning and go to work and he'd bring back reams of paper and would continue working late into the night he loved what he did so when he turned to me on anything I ever did from the time I

was a small small child I would be writing something and if the handwriting wasn't neat enough he would say hey is this world class and I remember thinking to myself you know for a five year old yeah this is world class but he would always push he would always say is this really you know the best that a five year old could ever do and it was a constant message and the story you're pointing to is one when I was in college after living through a lifetime of this is this world class question I had

a moment where I was starting my financial aid package included you know 10 hours of work study and I had the opportunity to work in the office of the dean of engineering and what was really funny to me at the time is as I'm leaving to go to my first day of work I called my parents my dad

gets on the phone he said make sure you do a world class job and I thought my dad thought I was like really doing something important in the office and in fact I was just photocopying and I said to my dad I'm photocopying and I'm filing there's no such thing as world class there and he said well

I'd still think about it so I get to the office and I am actually just photocopying and filing and I remember standing in front of this photocopy machine with a stack of papers thinking to myself what is world class in this situation and I decided it was really crisp copies where you couldn't tell

that it was a photocopy and so I remember really trying to make you know the color match and everything was straight and I spent a lot of time on the details and when I was filing things I didn't just hand-write it I got a label writer and I made sure it was printed out on labels and I really tried

to do everything as well as I possibly could and I remember I was getting donuts and I would like make sure I got the the fresh donuts instead of the ones that had been standing out in the basket for a while so every step of the way it was what can I do to make this experience for the dean or for

his executive assistant a delight moment and it was a real lesson for me because it was a case of real ownership I felt so much ownership of the job I was doing even though from the outside I think most people would have thought it was just sort of a grunt job and I think that's sort of again

when I come back to you don't just get luck you create these opportunities for yourself to me was a real learning experience right I mean you're you're looking at the potential precursors of luck and trying to set the conditions even though they might not always produce luck you can increase

the likelihood of it happening which I think is a perfect segue to discussion about spring breaks don't worry this isn't going anywhere tricky this relates to shadowing I'll just that'll be my cue which might bring you back so all right we're to lead into this you were giving a man a tour

around Yale yeah who is this man why were you giving him a tour what happened and I actually don't know all the details I just I found two lines in a past interview and I was like you know I want to dig into this because I don't there's more to this story I know it I'm a junior at the time

at Yale and doing this office work and the dean of engineering was the zolder gentleman Alan Brahmley and he had no idea who I was I'd been working in this office for I think two years but he barely knew my name he was just like this great he'd worked under George Bush senior he was

a legendary physicist and I really looked up to this man and so one day he he pokes his head out of the office and the executive assistant was out and he said who are you and I said I'm and Mira I'm your I'm your student assistant in this office and he's an oh I've heard of you

I need you to go and give this friend of mine a tour of the engineering facilities and he's I I know you'll do a good job Sarah's told me you're great and so I I take this gentleman and I take him on a fairly thorough tour of the engineering facilities and we just had a great conversation

and he it started off with you know where where you from and I said I was from Palo Alto and it turns out this guy is also from Palo Alto and we're just sort of talking about Palo Alto and the buildings that are around us and my growing up back in Palo Alto and in the middle of it he said

hey you know what are you doing for spring break and it just so happened I was gonna go back home and visit my family and he said well that's great because I'm wondering if you want to come and shadow me and see what I do for a living and in my complete self-centered moment of being a

you know junior I hadn't asked this guy what he did for a living and so I said well what do you do for a living and he said at the CEO of Hewlett Packard and I remember thinking to myself I'm such a moron and I said I think that would be amazing to be able to shadow you for a couple of

weeks during spring break and so this man Lou Plott invites me to just shadow him in 1997 and I am going around he didn't have a driver he was this was really just the the Hewlett and Packard air of CEOs he drove himself around in a Ford focus or remember this we'd go go to different

meetings and he took me around and one of the days actually Bill Gates came to make an announcement about dot net with Hewlett Packard and so it was an incredible event that happened I got to sit backstage and see everything that was happening and Lou Plott then invited the photographer to come

in and actually take a picture of me talking to Lou and I didn't really think about it but after the fact I get back to my dorm and Lou Plott has said me a thank you letter thanks for coming to visit I thought you would enjoy these photographs and there's two photographs in there I framed them

in my office now one is a picture of me sitting on a seat talking to Lou and then the second picture is Bill Gates sitting exactly in that spot that I was sitting in talking to Lou Plott and you know to me like mentorship means so many different things I've had so many different examples of mentors but to a junior in college who literally is a nobody he was such an incredible example of mentorship he never asked for my resume he never asked for my GPA he just sort of took this girl and said you

know what you have something I see it and I'm going to show you something even greater and to me that is such a gift it was so incredible because I hadn't even thought about my own personal potential ever no one had ever described anything to me and I came back from that with my mind completely

blown I met Ann Livermore who was an executive and I never seen a female executive in my entire life and here's someone who I could look at and see and I can see that people around her respect her it's a life-changing moment and it comes from that first comment from Dean Bromley who says

I've heard of you I heard you do a great job and that's where the opportunities opened up you're the woman responsible for my fresh donuts and crisp photo copies I've heard good things exactly it's a little things it's typed up filing labels now I should note you don't have to go too

deep into this but in a way you were perfectly primed for doing a good job with your photo copying and labeling after spending was it summers in Kanazawa in the stationary store am I making that up yeah no my first job was literally helping my uncle and grandmother sell

office supplies in Kanazawa Japan at our store Taikido and Kanazawa is just such I'd never been to Kanazawa for those people who don't know I used to live in Japan long time my first time out of the US was a year in Japan as an exchange student which is a whole

separate story but never made it to Kanazawa until a few years ago it's gorgeous and it's not that far away from Tokyo at all but such a cute spot with so much to offer yeah it's actually incredible because it's one of the few cities in Japan that was protected by historians the US it did not

get bombed in World War II because of some of the historic elements of the city so it's almost like a smaller version of Kyoto and it has a historic Japanese garden called Kenoku-en yeah Kenoku-en is unbelievable unbelievable so it's it's summers I would spend maybe like two blocks

away from Kenoku-en so it was an incredible set of summers but yes I I used to man the cashier register at the the office supply store so I know my pens and notebooks and stamps like nobody's business do you have any favorite go-to well don't worry I'm not gonna spend too much time on this

but do you have any favorite notebooks or pens or items of those types that you use today yeah yeah totally so on pens I love the juice up oh four how do you smell juice up juice up oh juice up okay yeah juice up oh four you can get them on Amazon they're super thin pens oh four that's

a point four millimeter or something yeah yeah yeah yeah and then for notebooks it's the nuna it's n u u n a some European brand but I like any notebook that has the dot matrix on it the paper quality is really great I see dot matrix it's not like graph paper there are perpendicular

lines that are dotted yes yes I'm very particular yeah I could go on and on it appeals to the dungeons and dragons and erud and me anything that resembles graph papers the juice up oh four and the nuna yeah definitely anything European sounding with the repeating vowel I'll pay 40% more for

maybe a hundred percent maybe a hundred percent you mentioned that you have these photographs in your office I'm curious you're sitting in your office right now yeah all right so what else I'm sure you have photographs who are family but outside of kind of the usual suspects what are other items that you have in your office that are important to you I have the original lift pink moustache mm-hmm used to go in the front of the cars which I love I have also a picture and a set of laser etched

metal plates that students gave to me that have sort of a word graph of all of the words that they thought they ascribed to me yeah students of what what was the context for these students interact with you and what are some of the words yeah so I had I teach at Stanford so after my PhD

what I realized was I loved teaching more than anything else and so I stayed in contact with a Tina Ceeleg and Tom buyers over at Stanford who run the Stanford Technology Ventures program and they've given me the opportunity to teach a few different classes but the one that I got

these metal plates and the photograph from was the class of 2013 Mayfield Fellows Group and they have words like thunder lizard badass inspiring mother so you know it's just really fun to see sort of what words they thought what were you teaching these Mayfield Fellows we were teaching them

basic concepts behind leadership and entrepreneurship and it's sort of the first exposure that they get as juniors as seniors into really you know startup ecosystem what does venture capital do within that ecosystem what are the tough choices that you have to make as a leader within these

types of organizations what does growth look like in these types of organizations so it's just sort of a startup 101 but what I love about it is it's only 12 students and it goes for nine months wow so if you get to be involved in it you get to really know some of the students and I've been

mentoring students and sometimes teaching some of these classes since 2008 and you get this whole arc of the career path of young people and I really love it I think it's just sort of you get to see you know students who start off as seniors and then they start their career they might go to

grad school then they go back and get a job they get married and then I think one is now about to have a kid so you just sort of see this whole arc and it's just about 10 years 20 years behind where I was and so I get to see this incredible progress that these students make over time so it's

it's something that I love. En Miracle Mother of Thunder Lizards aka Mother of Dragons we're going to come back to Thunder Lizard because there's a whole lot wrapped around that but yeah I'm going to try to keep my brains somewhat focused here is there a reading list for that class or do you recall

anything that was on a recommended or required reading list for that class? Yeah so we actually teach a I'm starting a class today at Stanford for the new spring quarter and in this class what we're teaching is what I would call intelligent growth it's a little bit different from the Mayfield Fellows but my hypothesis my belief is that just like fake news in politics there's actually

something that we would call fake growth and we've got a lot of it. We've worshipped at the altar of growth for about five to ten years now and what I've seen is that and this is startup growth specifically specifically within startups there's so much that we see that is fake and no one

has ascribed actual adjectives to growth until now and so the class that I'm teaching to engineering students at Stanford is around what is actually intelligent growth and so you asked about the reading for it it's all around some of these case studies that we've seen a great example

of that to me is Qualtrics we're going to have Ryan Smith who is the CEO of Qualtrics come in and speak and I think he's a great example because I think he was at $50 million in revenues before he raised a dime a venture capital money and so as a result he's going to own an incredible piece of

his company when it exits and it will and so I love the capital efficiency with which he built his business I also think you know one of my companies lift is a great example of having that kind of discipline early on and not just wasting venture capital dollars in the early days when they

didn't have product market fit so they spent two and a half years working on this platform called Zimride knowing that they had to get to density in riders and Zimride was just it was a platform where you could find carpooling arrangements and was being sold to universities and companies

but we couldn't get enough density to get transactions really moving fast and it was two and a half years before they launched lift and in the first six weeks you could start to see that there was real traction there and it was only after they knew what they were doing with lift that they went

and raised large round with founders fund and then an even larger round with injuries and horowitz and that story of really really hacking value before you go out and hack growth is something that I don't see often enough in Silicon Valley so it's something that I'm continuing to seek

and I love to see companies especially outside of Silicon Valley that do that and that's when we come back to hunting for thunder lizards that's what I'm looking for when you mentioned the case studies do you have written case studies that you're using much like I don't know if Stanford

uses these but much like the Harvard Business School case studies through these kind of three-ring binder yeah five to ten page cases that are published you use those so the ones that we focused on there's a Harvard Business case on floodgate that you can purchase off of the Harvard Business

Review website so anyone can purchase these you don't have to be a student keep going because the format of these case studies is really interesting to me and as an undergrad senior when I took Ed Schaus class and high-tech entrepreneurship which is how I met Mike Maple's junior who's going to

be a recurring character shortly I remember how useful they were so that's the only interjection sorry to interrupt no exactly so we we use that case study for Qualtrics there is one on floodgate so if you go to the Harvard Business Review site you can actually just search for floodgate or

Qualtrics and it'll come up and they're somewhere between you know five and fifteen dollars they're pretty easy to buy and download but I think those two in particular are quite valuable we have then also just people coming in and speaking about some of the things that they've learned

and how to grow that business from zero to one and then one to X and people like Michael Sebel who is now partner at Y Combinator but also was part of Justin TV and social cam we have Stephanie Schatz who was the fearless leader on the sales side for Xamarin she had eighteen

straight quarters of beating the stretch target so you can only imagine how incredible she is as a sales leader taking company from zero to fifty million dollars in revenues so we have a lot of different types of people whether they're CEOs or CROs or venture investors coming in to talk

about the kinds of trade-offs they had to make and how they decipher growth to make sure that they're they have the real kind and not just kind that they're buying right it just to elaborate on that for people who may not be in the startup world if for instance you're sitting in on an

incubator investor day and you see twelve companies in a row that have twenty percent month on month growth with very similar looking charts there's a possibility that they have been inflating or manufacturing the numbers with paid acquisition to race funding or do any number of things and

it's really easy to spot once you know the symptoms but there are an end then there are as poses you know Richard Feynman would say the physicist you must be sure not to trick yourself or fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool you can also get very caught up with

what you might consider vanity metrics but let me take a step back and just ask well before I ask people definitely take a look at the case studies for both Harvard and if you search Stanford GSB which is the business school case studies you'll also find a website with these

profiles of companies and not just companies but decisions they had to face generally where you can determine for yourself what you would do in a given situation then read about what they did whether it's MongoDB I'm looking at this Stanford GSB site in the case days right now so knows

and so on how did you first become exposed to say venture capital and what did you think you're going to do in college when you were in college junior year what did you expect you're going to do when you grew up I actually had multiple different paths I started off when we were

talking about my brother describing this kid who knew he wanted to work with cars or airplanes from the get go and guess what he's doing right now he's in Germany working with race cars just so you know and I was the complete opposite I think when I was four I wanted to be a farmer

then somewhere along the lines I really wanted to be a doctor and I wanted to be a doctor for a fairly long period of time where in freshman year summer I took organic chemistry I was in this pre-med track I think sophomore year summer you take the MCATs if you're pretty sure you want to

go to medical school and that summer I was with my best friend who also really wanted to go to medical school and she is right now studying leukemia she's a doctor at UCSF so she's she's clearly gone down that path and doubled down on it but I remember going to study for the MCATs with her and I

turned to the side and I looked at her and I had the sudden realization which was not and this is two days before we're taking the MCATs I said hey Kathy I hate hospitals I don't like actually being around sick people I also don't love it when people are always complaining to me and I think

that might get in the way of me being a doctor and she looked at me like I was an alien and she said why are you saying this right now we're about to take the MCATs and we need to go study for it at Kaplan but you know I was just constantly observing her and she is just this incredible human being

it should continue to be but this realization of wow like the actual job of being a doctor may not be something that I actually enjoy was really a hard realization when you've been all in for this long and so it was a realization that I really had to face and I knew I knew my gut

that I was doing it because it was a really great path it was a path where I knew what the next step was I knew what next class I had to take I knew the next exam I had to take then there was applications then there was school and then there was residency and fellowship and it just felt

like a really predictable thing to do but the actual work at the end of the day was not something I was going to love or enjoy and that was really disturbing to me and so I really screeched off of that path and it was hard because I had actually taken all of the requirements except for biology

and the pre-med requirements did not actually overlap very much with electrical engineering so I taken a lot of extra classes to make it a possibility but realized also it wasn't for me and that's where I was sort of in this state of not knowing what I wanted to be and that's for one

second yeah so what you just described illustrates a degree of self-awareness but also decision-making that I think is rather uncommon in the sense that I know a lot of people who have gone on to become doctors or lawyers or fill in the blank that has a lot of prerequisite training in schooling

because of say succumbing to the sunk cost fallacy like oh god I've put in so much time even though I have this intuitive feeling I'm not going to like it I really should do it and what was the conversation or the background that allowed you to step off of that path and not

to beat the like Asian kid drum too hard but but let's be real right I mean you're also that would be a very admirable well-respected happy to share at a dinner party with friends type of path for your parents I would assume so all the more uncommon that you would step off of that track

how is that the case why were you different so I think it goes back to actually the moment in debate where my mom is telling me you should do sensing instead of debate there was this realization of oh my parents really love me but they don't know me no one really knows me in terms of my capabilities

and what I feel like I can get done no one knows that better than I do it was an important lesson for me because one other fact that I didn't mention is that as a kid there was no sign that I was special except for you know these weird characteristics where I would go learn negotiations but I

failed the IQ test multiple times and the school district insisted I was not gifted or talented my mom had to fight for me to be part of this gifted and talented program as a two-year-old after I I was a really hostile to people who spoke English my mom stuck me in tried to put me into

preschool to socialize me but I ended up biting the person who was interviewing me for preschool slot and they put me in special education I was one of those kids who got picked up in a short yellow bus from our house and take into state run program for special children

and I think for a long time my mom wasn't really sure what I was but she just decided to be all in on the fact that I was gifted and talented even if I wasn't and she was really worried that I was I was one of these special children and so I had sort of an environment around me way before Yale

where I knew what I was capable of even if the test scores showed that I wasn't and I knew that I knew what I was capable of even if my parents didn't see it in me and I think there's sort of this this moment in time that people need to have where you realize that there's no test for human potential

there's no recognition for that it's something that you have to find inside of yourself and I think for me that one of those tests was actually going back to am I going to be a great doctor and if I revisit this question that my dad had always asked me can you be world class

I knew I couldn't because I looked at Kathy and she was going to be world class she loved helping people and she loved helping people from that kind of care-taking perspective which is not where I was going to be world class but I felt like there was something in me where I

could be great at something that just wasn't it and how did you have you've all of this technical training by this point you have the chemistry but you certainly also have the let's see here at that point the electrical engineering probably yeah how does finance and investing or startups

I don't know which came first enter the picture so having grown up in Palo Alto I was actually exposed to a lot of startups as it even as a kid my I used to babysit for a serial entrepreneur and he was always tinkering around in his garage and I remember thinking to myself he works for

himself which is very very cool I also on my debate team was Lisa Brennan jobs who I didn't really realize she was the daughter of Steve Jobs until I was in her house we were talking about debate I was a senior at the time and I was helping her through learning the ropes of speech and debate

and Steve Jobs sort of appeared out of nowhere and I remember thinking to myself what what is Steve Jobs doing in this house and so you know it was just sort of it was all around and so venture capital was something that actually friend of mine had brought up when I was still struggling with this

notion what should I be and he was a real finance guy and he said you know you're you're really good at technology and you're now interested in business because of this exposure to loop plot you know have you ever thought of venture capital and I remember kind of reading about it and having

heard a little bit about it growing up looking into it and realizing oh you have like all this work experience you need to have I talked to a couple of former Yelis who were venture capitalist and and sort of had that in my in the back of my head and so you know I went off to work at McKinsey

as a consultant for three years and then in the process of trying to figure out what to do next I met a venture capitalist by the name of Ted Dindra Smith and in that interview with him we spoke about not about technology not about the research I'd done or my work experience but he

wanted to know what books I was reading he wanted to know about the music that I loved and in that period I was really into modern American literature so I was really into EL Doctor O there are few books that I just absolutely loved and we talked about that for a little while and then when

we turned to music I've played piano classical pianos since I was four and he he and I talked about the the classical musicians that I really loved and he happened to be an English lit major along with being a physics major so he he loved books as much as I did maybe even more and then he was

an opera nut and so we had all these things that we could talk about and two hours into that conversation never having touched upon technology he then basically said how would you like to come work with me and I was living out in Palo Alto at the time this is an opportunity in Boston and I

remember not not even hesitating knowing that I wanted to work with this person this human beings sitting across the table for me I jumped at that opportunity and it wasn't it wasn't the fact that was in venture capital but rather I really wanted the chance to be working around someone

like Tedden to Smith at that time let's talk about that interview for a second so that I think would strike some people as a very unusual interviewing style do you think in retrospect and maybe you know that he had already decided you were fully capable of doing the job therefore didn't have

to check that box and just wanted to make sure that he could work with you and spend time with you was it that he was using that interview to sell you so that when he made the offer you would say yes what do you think was going through his mind before during or after or I suppose before and

during that conversation you know I think Ted is a very unique human being in that I used to have this perception that networking was working a room and like you shake a lot of hands and hold a lot of babies and you learn a few names and you move on I learned from Ted that networking is

actually a deep curiosity about the human being who's sitting across the table from you so I don't think he necessarily had that kind of purpose in mind but that he was just really interested in what I was interested in and we happened to find commonality and he was trying to understand how my mind

worked and what I was interested in I've taken that as a real lesson because I love the way he would network he learned so much about people in that process and that's how he ministered to his entrepreneurs he also was capable of providing advice at the right time because

he really knew those people and so for me I felt like it was a really unique interview it stood out from all the interviews I've ever had but I think he was learning more about me than most other technical interviews could have gotten to and then you know his other partners I think

EZAR Armini gave me sort of more of a case study and could dive into that but Ted always had a deep curiosity about the human being and not necessarily just the skills what else did you learn from him or in that position in that job I thought that Ted was also an incredible first

principles thinker so my second day of work at CRV was 9-11 oh my god so so it was you went from kind of a bad economy to a horrible black hole economy and and so it was a really terrible time for venture and they had just raised this 1.4 billion dollar fund so that's I mean for venture

that's a huge amount of money and it's a huge accomplishment to convince so many investors to invest in your venture capital firm at that amount then Ted took the time to actually start to do analysis with me on how much capital had gone into venture capital at that moment and then

the exits had stopped there were no more IPOs no one was acquiring companies the economy just came to a screeching halt and he decided along with the other partners in this firm to give back most of the money so they reduced their fund from 1.2 billion dollars to 450 million dollars

and the reason why that's so interesting and impressive is that the way of venture capital firm makes money the way you have any salary or the operating money that you have for the firm is a direct percentage of the fund that you raise and so by shrinking the size of the fund

you're shrinking the size of the management fees that you get pretty dramatically oh for sure very dramatically I mean for people who don't know I mean you hear very often it's not always the case but in venture capital two in twenty two in twenty and that means 2% management fee

based on the sort of assets under management meaning that particular fund and then 20% of the upside for people who don't know right they decided to give back those management fees and to me that was really really impressive because you're facing down a really terrible economy not only are you

shrinking the size of your fund to reflect that you're also shrinking the size of your management fees and you're you're taking that below so things like that I learned I learned also how to shepherd companies through that kind of difficult time and how to be a true partner to an entrepreneur

and so you know I think it was a really important lesson to learn because I would argue most people haven't seen real cycles people seem to think 2008 was a real significant dip in the economy but anyone who lives through 2001 knows that 2008 was a blip compared to a real downturn

because we've had a raging bull market for such a long time that memory and that knowledge of having survived you know 2001 as a crisis period is something that I hold with me really in my war chest I know how to get through that kind of time period and I don't think a lot of people do

yeah it makes me think of a lot of what I heard in Silicon Valley still here I know before moving to Austin which makes me think of I'm gonna paraphrase this but it's a quote from Sir John Templeton I think it is which is the most expensive words and investing are this time it's different and it has been quite the bull run you mentioned first principles thinking I want to tie that into something you mentioned related to your class tough choices for leaders what are some of the toughest

choices for leaders I suppose in this context CEOs or high level exact co-founders of companies what are some of the toughest decisions that nonetheless seem to come up fairly commonly the most difficult thing for a startup founder CEO leader you witness multiple phase changes in a business and so if you imagine you're going from absolutely nothing to something that's what I call the zero to one phase

you're searching for product market fit you're trying to find the best customers you're trying to find where your tenets advantage is truly valued that's a very different business process and truth seeking then when you're going from one to X which is now that I know what my value proposition is I'm

going to add to that but I'm also going to pull on some of these growth levers the fundamental job of a VP of marketing who is in that zero to one phase changes dramatically one to X it changes dramatically for the the salesperson in zero to one to X and you go through this incredible

Bermuda triangle where you have to navigate that change and so what I see challenging for startup founders is actually being comfortable with your fundamental job shifting from every three months you would have a massive shift in what you need to focus on and how you need to develop

and I think a company is a multi-dimensional thing and in Silicon Valley we spend so much time thinking about product and product market fit that we forget that there's this huge emphasis you might want to place on the fact that a company is also an organization a company is also a

category that you're building company is also a business model you know companies also a team and so it's the skill set actually to balance all of those things and knowing when you fundamentally need to change out the talent in your team the knowing when you actually need to let go of a product

and knowing actually to me this is probably the hardest piece knowing the difference between a winning strategy versus a strategy not to lose could you elaborate on that please yeah so to me a strategy not to lose is a lot of different things it's to not to lose to a competitor not to

lose talent a strategy not to lose out on revenue so it's all these fears that you have a captured ground or the fact that you might have someone take over something that you want to do a competitor who's breathing down your neck versus a strategy for winning is about where do you double down on

what do you do to capture ground to be aggressive to play offense and not defense to me that is a huge difference between that strategy of I'm going to win in this market versus I'm not going to lose and not losing often involves a lot of hedging and when you feel that urge to hedge you need to focus and you need to be offensive in what ways might that hedging manifest what would be examples you've seen or hypotheticals of the symptoms of a defensive strategy in the form of hedging it might

manifest itself in I am going to go after two very different customer segments one is large enterprises the other small medium businesses and the reason why that's really hedging is you have two completely different ways of selling to those organizations and you're afraid to pick one because maybe you have some revenue in both right but in that situation by not choosing to focus on one group or the other you're probably a short changing your team because you don't have a specialized team to go

after that opportunity you're short changing your business model because you aren't pricing your product correctly and you're short changing the opportunity because probably your product is an optimized for that customer set your customer service isn't optimized for that product set

and your team is ultimately confused because you're heading into completely different conditions and directions and so that's one of the most common ways that I see people involved in a strategy of not losing instead of we're here to win it yeah all of those things you mentioned also contribute to

lighting money on fire right I mean that that split focus just the bonfire the bonfire of funding or cash flow depending on where it comes from this is really important and you know this but I want to underscore it for people listening and give a few other examples that might be worth people

might enjoy exploring so this winning versus not losing distinction seems really subtle but you can get in two to feel for it in a few different ways one is there's actually a there's a three-part mini series podcast called the making of Oprah and it talks about the rise of Oprah I know this

seems like an odd segue Oprah impresses the hell out of me on a million different ways and after you listen to this you'll understand exactly why that's the case but she would constantly tell her team many of whom wanted to respond to say donahue who is the 800 pound gorilla at the time like we

need to race our own race in the sense that if you're on a thoroughbred horse and you're in a race you need to focus on your race you can't be looking side to side at the competitors the racers next you get yourself into a lot of trouble you get really injured and the second is if people want to

google dan gable on aggression there's a short video I put on my blog that hits this point exactly and I'm giving examples from different disciplines because it is cross disciplinary it's not just investing in startups dan gable is the most legendary wrestling coach certainly of the last I would

say 100 years in the United States also won a gold medal in the nineteen I want to say seventy two Munich Olympics without having a single point scored on him that just does not happen and this video will show you a lecture that he's giving one of his athletes after his athlete

tied and he said you lost him twice before you just didn't want to lose he said you never win that way you got a tie and that's exactly why you got a tie and the difference is just so powerful it's worth I just thought taking a second to underscore it because I think it's really

a critical distinction that you brought up it's our sort of like I think about it I love to ski and I have this instructor once I was complaining about going through powder and I was saying how it really hurt my my thighs he's like my thighs are burning and he looks at me he said

it's because you're not leaning forward and like the minute you lean forward suddenly you're just gliding and it's scary in that moment when you lean forward because you feel like you're going to fall and yet it gives you so much more control it's so much less effort counterintuitively

definitely and that to me is like the perfect example of oh like you have to actually have a little bit of aggressiveness in order to have the win I think you are well suited in that respect how did you meet the man who so famously tries to trick not trick that sounds too strong

who so commonly will say something like well I'm just a southern boy maybe you could slow down and explain that one more time which by the way if you ever hear anything like that like really stop and pay attention because you're about to be tricked or misdirected I've actually borrowed

that and I use that for long island a lot I'm like you know I'm just a slow long island boy take a second maybe explain that to me again how did you meet Mike Maples Jr. Yeah so this actually happened in one of the classes that I was teaching at Stanford he was

one of the mentors for a bunch of teams so we had all these teams who are creating business plans for their own version of a startup company and we had incredible mentors to each of these teams we had I think someone who was the former CEO of Barassign we had I think Diane Green might have been

a mentor to one of the teams and we had like two Diane Green is for those who don't know Diane Green is now the head of Google Cloud she was also the CEO of VMware big deal big deal so big deal big deal and what we what we did was we would team up some of these

entrepreneurs or people in Silicon Valley with a student team and Mike was one of them and for people who know Mike he's just this charming boy from Oklahoma he calls himself sometimes a washed up enterprise VC and or washed up enterprise entrepreneur but he's not so he came to our class and he was mentoring this team but he was actually being too nice and so this he was having like all sorts of weird issues they were fighting and they came to my office hours and one of them started to cry

and spotting a theme here within proximity of right I did not make this team member cry it was they were making each other cry and so I was just kind of I was really I was kind of mad at Mike because part of the role of the mentor is to help shepherd them through his tough point and he was just

kind of checked out on that front and I emailed him he said oh yeah my team's doing great and I said well I kind of beg to differ they were just in my office and one of them started to cry and they're fighting and right now if they don't pull it together they're really going to fail the class

and he just wrote me this message that said well I think they're going to get an A plus and so is it was so far not tracking and so we just sort of have this friendly banter and actually the team does turn it around and they ended up getting an A plus in the class and did Mike

enter a B in or did he just throw some turtle shells on a desk and like divine his way to that outcome I'm not really sure but I actually take full credit for the turn around because had I not pointed it out to Mike then the team would have just imploded so based on that interaction a few

years later I was starting to get to a point in my PhD where I was thinking of starting my own company and I had started my PhD in computer security exactly because I knew that it didn't matter when I graduated there would be a computer security problem out there and I wouldn't be at risk

of market timing and it was sort of a perfect opportunity because just as I was going through my research it was from 2003 to 2007 at this point we had transformed from this world of where security used to be a bunch of vandalism problems to now there were companies involved in like real

money was being involved and so real crime was being created here and then towards the end there was really like nation state warfare starting to happen and so my research was really in risk management of computer security and I knew that this was becoming a huge issue and so I started

to think I'm going to make a company so at that moment I turned to you some of my advisors and my advisors were nice enough to say hey if you're thinking about starting company you've been in the ivory towers for literally four years so you should get out of the classroom and go check out

some angel investors and then Mike was one of the first people I turned to and I asked him if I could see his deal flow and he was nice enough to say sure why don't you just come in and take a look at my deal flow on Wednesdays and so we would sit next to each other and look at companies and

deal flow means the top of the funnel companies that he's considering potentially investing in right they would come in and pitch for between 30 minutes and an hour and then at the end of that I think it was March of 2008 he calls me as I'm actually going up to Tahoe to ski he calls me to

say hey and I have this great idea I just raised my first fund it's 35 million dollars and I think that you should drop out of your PhD program and join me and it's not the venture back startup that you've been thinking about but it's now a backed venture startup let's go oh I like that

that's really good now was that an immediate yes or was it a let me sleep on it I actually thought he was crazy because first of all you know I was literally again I was a nobody I'm a PhD's candidate I don't even have my degree at Stanford so there's like all these business school

students there's great you know angel investors milling around what the major question was like why does this guy think that I would actually be a good investor and then the second piece was there were a ton of venture capital firms that were being started up so even when I went back to

people who were my mentors some of them said why would you go to a no name VC why won't you go and be an associate at Kleiner Perkins or Excel or Sequoia yeah and I don't really have a good answer and just to set the stage for folks who don't know maybe the recent history in Silicon Valley at the

time that Mike had proposed this to you sort of micro cap venture capital was barely a thing there are a lot of funds of all sorts of different sizes now but at the time this was very unusual yeah and so it was you know at this point in when you get to 2018 there's probably you know 30

funds being pitched a week to a limited partner who invests into these venture capital firms but back then there was very very few and so it was really a question of is this the smart thing to do and I think this is sort of where you know when you turn to an entrepreneur this is the feeling that

they get what I sensed was there was actually a major change of foot all of the students around me at Stanford didn't need five million dollars to start a company and that's what venture capital was offering to startups at that point they would say I will buy 50% of your company for five million

dollars right it was predicated on the entry cost Spain very high in summer very very high and like at that point we suddenly have open source software we really have what's starting to look like cloud computing we have all the shared resources so even though I was helping to run servers and

the closet at my grad school in our lab that was starting to become something that we didn't need there was actually you know services that you can use where you could rent services and so to me there was a dramatic change that was happening and so you had to change the financing

environment so I felt like I could see something that everyone else didn't see that Mike was also seeing and he used to say 500,000 is the new five million and then the second piece for me was this guy Mike Maples had a skill set I had never seen before it may be in like one or two other

people in my entire lifetime but he was this incredible marketer and I used to believe you either build things or you sold things everything else just seemed like an extraneous skill set to have but Mike was incredible at storytelling and positioning and strategy like real strategy for how do you

create a new category and how do you build that category and how do you create the king of that category and as an engineer I hadn't thought about what you do after you build the product and so this magic of category creation to me was something that almost felt like magic and so I looked at

Mike and I thought I really need to learn from this person and not only is it a great skill set that I'm learning from he is also genuinely one of the best human beings that I've ever encountered and so it was just sort of this magical combination of someone whose values really aligned with me

and how I wanted to build a firm and the things that I wanted to do with that and how I wanted to treat entrepreneurs and a person who was a mad genius and so that combination to me was irresistible and so a couple months into it I said sign me up a couple of months all right so question number one

just for people who are wondering and I know a lot of people you seem very good at avoiding the sunk cost fallacy and this is so so so key this cognitive bias when you were looking at the quitting of the PhD program I don't know how it works at Stanford but you didn't have to quit

I know I did not quit so so that first year to half of my life at floodgate was crazy because at that point I joined floodgate and I have an 18-month-old child my daughter Abby and then I think it was four or five months into it I am pregnant with my second child I've promised my mother as any good

Asian daughter would that I will finish this PhD if it's the last thing I do so I'm waking up at like four o'clock in the morning doing research until you know seven when my daughter wakes up then taking her to daycare and then working from like 830 to 630 at floodgate and then

coming back doing dinner and then working on my PhD again rinse and repeat and then I got pregnant with my second child a few months into that and then decide I was going to defend my PhD they set the date for six weeks after I gave birth to my son so you know I not only

did my first set of investments but also gave birth to a child cared for another one and managed to stay married and finished this PhD all between 2008 and 2009 and so you know to me like that's like the most creative and probably productive period of my life ever and probably will be but

also showed me that I can actually do a lot of things that everyone around me was like why would you do all of those things at the same time this is going to seem like a non-sacritor kind of is but how does your mom say your name because Anne is sort of an unusual first name oh no but that's

what my first name my first name is a deco deco yeah so how does my mom say she's like deco deco chao deco chao sagoine I can barely that's another word everybody should look up and learn SUGO I sagoina that just means sort of awesome impressive a whole but all sort of things because

I can barely manage to brush my teeth and shower on a daily basis and yet you're doing all these things simultaneously I have to pause at this point just to try to fill out the some of the the colors of who deco chao emirico is what have you struggled with like to have you had any dark really

doesn't have to be dark but difficult times dark times that you could tell us about and where you really struggled or is that not part of your sort of lexicon no I think we we all have struggles right so I think even in this moment of like the PhD and caring for my kids and caring for myself

and my husband and my family and trying to do a good job at work like things slip right and I struggle with this still today and this is where the darkness comes in is like am I doing anything well like am I good mother today my my my six year old is on a field trip and he asked me why is

it that you never get to come on a field trip like those are all these moments where you wonder like am I failing at being a parent or I'm not able to get to the dishes and I I had a moment where my front door neighbor is actually a Japanese woman a nosy Japanese woman and she went up to

she went up to my mother and she said you know your family so strange I always see the husband doing the dishes but never the wife never the wife that is the most nosy Japanese neighbor thing to say ever it's like I spent two days like in in that in that front window doing dishes

and at some point I was like I'll screw this but it's like all no it is this constant battle of how do I figure out what my priority is so that I have like minimum viable progress on some front and then the thing that really matters I'm going to make massive progress on that's where the

darkness creeps in I think you know for me my my really loser moments have been things like early on I just described to you early how there were tests that always said like I wasn't that smart there were lots of examples where I wasn't good at a lot of different things that other people

found very normal like I was horrible at standardized tests only until I got to like senior year or junior year in high school did I finally figure it out like there's so many places where so many people said distinctly average maybe not even that smart and I think for me it's been learning to

tune out the naysayers and knowing that there's certainly a lot of things I'm not going to be good at but there are things that I can actually be great at a really good example that actually is my PhD I remember when I got to my PhD at Stanford and I'm starting first of all like I took a math class

and there were college freshmen in this class and it felt like the path teacher was speaking Greek and the freshmen are flying through this material because they're like little kid geniuses and I remember thinking to myself well clearly I should not be getting a PhD in math and thank

goodness this is an operations research then I had this second experience where the new professor came in across the hall for me his name was Ramesh Johari he was my age because I had taken five years off to start my PhD he was literally my age and he was incredible he could remember things

about different papers and theorems and how they were proved from like years past compare and contrast them he just knew things that I struggled to remember and I remember looking at him and being in one of his seminars and thinking to myself that is world class as an academic I'm okay at it

but I would have moments where I was like I'm actually not even good at it and then I would go to a conference and like when you compare yourself against the world of PhD students and obvious then you start to develop a little bit more confidence then you go back to Stanford and you see

what world class is and and I was thinking to myself this isn't the path and there's a place where I actually can use the skill sets that I do have where I can be really good at the things that I'm doing and so if I I'm sitting here saying I was always good at everything that I did it's just not

true there are so many moments where I realize it's like being a doctor I said I would not be good at being a doctor I would not be great at being an academic I would not be great at a lot of different things just knowing and having the self awareness of where I would double down is I

think what what I was good at and so it makes this emergent life where I was going from one track to another I was going to be a doctor and then I went to McKinsey and then I went to VC and then I went to get a PhD and then I went back to VC this is all self discovery rather than a stated path

that I had career plan for a long time well it strikes me also that and maybe I'm trying to create narrative where there isn't one or a connection but it seems reasonable that Mike's superpower or one of his abilities to help create categories and then sort of mint kings within a given category

is actually a different species of something that you're also good at which is kind of a jack wealthy in in a sense and that is you're looking at the different paths you could take and if you can't be say number one or number two in that thing it just gets rolled out and you're asking this

world class question over and over again and one way is to find something where you can dominate and really be world class and the other is to create an entirely new category in a sense so it seems like you and Mike are a complimentary in that way and have that shared programming I've heard

people describe you as an investor when your strengths is being technical which I suppose seems self evident given your background but how would Mike let's say describe your if I asked him what are and superpowers as an investor there are a lot of investors out there

what is and superpower set of superpowers what would he say I think for me the superpowers I have are a fewfold so one is because of the technical capabilities that I have when someone is describing particularly anything that has to do with math and luckily for me right now math

is having this incredible resurgence in artificial intelligence and in cryptocurrency I can get that piece I can get that piece better than I would say probably 99% of the investors out there and so if I get a math paper that's something that I love to dig into and that technical insight

is something that I think I'm better at than most other investors out there and then from there I can also start to piece together what that company will look like around that technology and so it's not just I'm looking for great R&D projects but ones that are ripe to be big D and

little R and I think that's a superpower especially at the very early stage so one of the companies that I invested in back in 2010 Iyosti they've gone over a hundred million dollars in financing at this point and I found them when they were they didn't even have a business plan they had four

math papers that they sent to me and so to me that that's something that I double down on and it's a part of the types of investments that I like to do that's very different from the taskrab it's refinery 29 and lift that I've done in the past as well I think the other superpower that is

a little bit less evident is more evident as I'm working with people is I feel like I have a pretty good sixth sense about the people dynamics within an organization so I can tell when there's actually infighting happening I can sense when executive is starting to disengage and those are things that

I work on with a lot of the CEOs that I work with and then the the last piece that I think I really loved to engage in is the fundamental data behind the business and so I love looking at the cohort analysis and really engaging on data because that's a piece of the puzzle that I feel like I'm also

good at encoding unencoding what are you looking for now and what are Thunder losers we mentioned hunting Thunder losers earlier and I promised I would come back to it so maybe we define that first and perhaps you could tell us what you're looking for at the moment so a Thunder lizard is inspired

by Godzilla it's a term that Mike my partner used to always tell the story which is that we are inspired by entrepreneurs who are like Godzilla and so what is Godzilla like he's born from radio active atomic age so the DNA of that entrepreneurs already fundamentally different and then he swims

across the Pacific Ocean and depending on if your Mike or me he lands in either the Bay Area or Tokyo and starts to wreak havoc and eats trains and automobiles and buildings and then proceeds to crush that industry and creates disruption and then build something out of that and so that idea

of disruption is something that that I always liked that imagery of like the journey across the Pacific Ocean born from something fundamentally different and then really starting to turn things over so when we say okay what are we looking for right now in terms of where do we think the new

Thunder Lizards will exist there's sort of two different areas that comes back to the map that I'm really interested in one is I do think that artificial intelligence is about to disrupt a lot of different types of enterprise software I think that enterprise software still sucks and if

we're going to be able to really transform the way a business is actually operated we have to take the software that just basically records data and spits it back out to you into something that's actually more intelligent that tells you something that you didn't know that gives you super powers

and I think that we're going to see more and more of that in the industry and so as an example like baseline examples why do we spend millions of dollars on Oracle or Net Suite when the CFO still has to make a budget for next year why doesn't that financial planning just automatically

automatically generate itself based on all the history that it knows plus all the data from the external world so I think things like that we're going to start to see happen more and more I also think you know fundamentally the scientific method may also be dead like we list used to have

the scientific method is developed in a time where we didn't have enough data and data was actually the fundamental bottleneck in scientific research well that's just not the case anymore and so why is it that we form a hypothesis then look at the data and then come to a conclusion

we should have all the data then have an analysis that that leads us to a hypothesis or a belief system that we fundamentally test further so I think these massive changes are coming and you see it even in cryptocurrency there's also really philosophical interesting debates happening

around well you have this massive pull towards centralization whether it's in AI and ML where you have to have all of that data in one place in order to really train MLB machine learning machine learning or in cloud computing you're also putting it up into the data into more in data centers

in cryptocurrency we believe that there's going to be more decentralized software and so how do you reconcile those two types of systems I think there's lots of really interesting things that are just at the start of being discovered I'm really excited about what's going to happen with

autonomous vehicles and the technology that's going to be required to make that a reality and so all of those areas I think are just fascinating and so it feels like the period of real intellectual abundance and that we're headed into a period of real great creative energy end of time where a lot

of your philosophical training and reading will be put into practice in the real world right where we have people can look up the trolley scenario it's typically thought of as a thought exercise but if you're programming not take us too off on a tangent but if you're programming for autonomous

vehicles and there's some type of act of God of hell storm a huge boulder falls in the middle of the street and the car has to serve left and hit two school kids are sort of right and hit five geriatrics now does it make the decision right what is the logic embedded into that machine it takes

a lot of these philosophy 101 thought exercises and translates them very directly into the real world with real consequences it is it is a fascinating time it's also like how much do you want to know right so deep learning it's actually very difficult to know what's happened inside of this

black box and so there's more of a demand for let's know what's actually happening this inside of this black box especially if lives are risk or billions of dollars are risk and we need to be able to audit these algorithms I think there's real interest in new technologies now that we can

actually audit and know what's going on inside the box so that if the the trolley example happens we actually know how the machines will make their decisions and so I think there's a lot of work to be done a lot of opportunity but also a lot of thought that needs to go into how we want to

regulate all of this tricky tricky tricky yeah well it's going to be going to be exciting interested to see how all these things coalesce right also you're looking at these gigantic companies the Facebook's Google's the fangs right that are more and more so converging onto the

same territory to see how that resolves if it does in some fashion is also really really exciting to me or how something like Y Combinator just to do a little bit of inside baseball can say we are interested in this type of company or this particular aspect of engineering or fill in the

blank and kind of steer the attention of thousands or tens of thousands of would be entrepreneurs into a particular sector right or type of project is also just really interesting to think about from the ramifications five years down the line but anyway maybe we have I mean like I think we

have so many incredible societal problems that need to be solved and I believe that the private sector is most capable of solving these problems whether it's energy or health or the fact that we have so much trash how do we solve that how do we get clean water to people it's not just about

the next social network and how do we deliver better advertising to people but the beauty of this type of entrepreneurship is that there are huge societal problems that still need to be solved that I think is a really exciting opportunity also to build great businesses around and so I

think that's also what gets me up in the morning and makes me believe that what we're doing is important work yeah it is important work I don't think that sort of collective interest and self interest have to be misaligned right they're not mutually exclusive you can solve and there's a

long history of solving public problems with private sector technologies and companies and let me just ask I know we we've gone a little bit longer than expected which I should have expected let me ask you just a few more questions then we'll wrap up with where people can find you and

learn more about what you're up to besides getting to yes are there any books that you've given a lot as gifts or reread a lot yourself for me you know right now there's a couple books that I think are are super interesting so my mentor Ted Dentre Smith just wrote a book called What School

Could Be and this goes back to sort of education as a critical societal question how do we fix education and what he did was he went on a 50 state tour to look at schools and discover that the answers are actually already there and our incredible school teachers throughout our country

are already finding solutions to teaching our kids the most important skills they need to have and I think reading that book has not only given me hope but also a desire to see real change in the public school education system but I think that's a really important problem for all of us

to actually engage in and so that's one book that I would really push on to other people the other one that his completely on the opposite end of the spectrum but it is a fiction book it is by Colled Hossani who also wrote kite runner he wrote this book called a thousand splendid sons

probably one of the most beautiful books that I've read in a long time in terms of fiction writing and I would encourage people to read it because gives you a sense of Afghanistan's incredible history and the role women have played within that history and I just loved that book because it just

was eye opening to me in a very different way so two very different types of books none of them like straightforward business books but ones that I think are meaningful for a society to read today what school could be in 1000 splendid sons yeah is there any purchase of a hundred dollars or less that's kind of arbitrary right but just not a boogadier something that is most positively impacted your life or positively impacted your life in recent memory a hundred dollars or last yeah it could

be I mean like if it's like a foldable kayak that you got for 400 that's fine too but it could be anything could be two dollars could be free could be any recent addition to your life that oh my gosh so it's actually a foldable chair so I go to my daughter's soccer tournament so a lot and

there's this incredible foldable chair I don't know what it's called you can get an on amazon but it has this flip over sunshade that goes over your head and for any parent who has been at a swim tournament or anything this is life changing because oftentimes I'm just baking in the hot sun

and you can be anywhere and you have your own personal tent that like folds over your head it's like saved me on multiple weekends my husband bought two of them I love it can you send me a link to that and I'll put it in the show notes if you can track it down

so for people wondering I'll put that in the show notes at tim. blog forward slash podcast and you can find this miraculous foldable chair if you could have a giant billboard anywhere with anything on it so metaphorically speaking getting a word a quote a message a question anything

out two millions or billions of people can't be an advertisement what might you put on that billboard wow hmm I wonder if it's like not losing does not equal winning it's sort of one of my one of my themes these days I like that yeah and I think actually finding your world class life

is probably the other one that I would think about will give you find your world class life and I think the reason for that is to me everyone is capable of that and I think oftentimes we forget it and for every person it's different that's the beauty of humanity so what do the characters for

Dekal mean oh my gosh so it means it's a small round bell and the reason for my parents naming me that was they were originally going to name me something more like you know really beautiful child or you know genius child in my mom my mom took one look at me when I was born she's like no none of

those she said your face was so perfectly round when you were born it reminded me of this like perfectly round bell and I'm like mom like all these other friends that I have especially Chinese friends that are like super intelligent world class dominating dictator for life CEO child you

know and I'm like small bell child and where can people find you online say hello learn more about what you are up to I think professionally the best place is to see my Twitter which is anomaniac a n n n I am a n I a c or on Instagram it's a m i u r a you'll see more of my life there

a mura yes three bays is that what that means mura something like that maybe yeah mm-hmm so Twitter and maniac Instagram a mura m i u r a and best website floodgate it's floodgate.com floodgate.com why floodgate what is a floodgate or why why is it called floodgate yeah

yeah because we think we're at the forefront of like the headwaters of innovation and it sounded I don't know kind of big and audacious good enough reason audacious audacious yes audacious aggressive but still the mother of dragons there is a nurturing mother like there is

there is den mother quality to and you're like a mama bear you know I'll I'm very protective but also I'm going to push my kids and people around me to be the best they can be just don't get in between the the mother and the cub it's good guideline and I will say for anybody who's wondering

what would it be like to just go sort of mono-amano with and I would say you know you're one of the few people I would put Sam Harris in this category where if you are willing to engage in like a public debate with either of you you just have to make sure that you have practice defending

against having your face ripped off and like the most logical complimentary way possible I'm just very impressed by you and and I've I've really wanted to have you on the show for a long time and I'm thrilled that you were willing to carve out a few hours to spend chatting and it's

always fun chatting we still have fun Tim you've been there from the very get co you were the person behind my very first investment in task rabbit so I have a lot to thank you for as well well the adventure shall continue and I will certainly I'm not as involved as I used to be in

the taxi and but I'll be cheering from the sidelines so anything like else that you'd like to say or suggest or mention any parting words before we wrap up now I hope your audience enjoyed this and if they got anything out of it that they if they want to contact me I'm always open to

more conversations and hope that some of my story shows that even if people tell you can't do something that that you can can indeed just got to spend the summer reading up on those 12 topics that's right you would can't always out-talent everyone but if you out-prepare them you might as

well have out-talented them maybe the billboard sign is effort matters effort matters it does well and thank you so much again this has been such a treat and a gift and I look forward to hearing what people have to say on the on the interwebs and perhaps we'll do a round two in person during one

of what was the name of the was it the timferess wine hour what was what was he true to yeah yeah at the offices we call it Ferris time that the mic calls it Ferris time which was the yeah little little wine a pair of teeth just smooth out the edges that will we can describe

the other he just grabs the glasses like I think it's Ferris hour I'll take it I will take it and and I will talk to you soon see you soon I hope and to everybody listening you can find links to everything we discussed the books the fold out share and much more getting to yes and so on

in these show notes as you can with all episodes that Timed Up, Log forward slash podcast and until next time thank you for listening hey guys this is Tim again just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet Friday would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday

that provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a half and two million people subscribed to my free newsletter my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday easy to sign up easy to cancel it is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the

coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week it's kind of like my diary of cool things it often includes articles on reading books on reading albums perhaps gadgets gizmos all sorts of tech tricks and so on they get sent to me by my friends including a lot

of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you so if that sounds fun again it's very short a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend something to think about if you'd like to try it out just go to

Tim.blog slash Friday type that into your browser Tim.blog slash Friday drop in your email and you'll get the very next one thanks for listening this episode is brought to you by eight sleeve I have been using eight sleeve pod cover for years now why well by simply adding it to your

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